


how could i smile?

by avosettas



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Amnesia, Gen, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Pre-Episode: 2015 Xmas The Husbands of River Song, Prosopagnosia, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25534777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avosettas/pseuds/avosettas
Summary: There are holes everywhere.Who found him, when he changed? Who was the first face that this angry, Scottish face saw?
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald
Kudos: 10





	how could i smile?

**Author's Note:**

> [thinks about twelve] [wails]

There are holes everywhere. 

Who found him, when he changed? Who was the first face that this angry, Scottish face saw? The first people he comes up with are Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, but he knows it wasn’t them. A fourth person was there. Someone who is little more than a hole in his memory, now. 

Before that, too. 

Who traveled with him, after Amy and Rory were taken from him? Someone did, he _knows_ someone did! Who jumped into his timeline and saved his life, kept him from killing two point four seven billion children, and begged for a new regeneration cycle? 

Clara. The answer to all of these questions, is, of course, Clara. But it would be easier to accept if he could remember her face, her voice, her mannerisms…

Of course, even if he saw her, he might not recognize her, even if he hadn’t gone and lost his memory of her. This regeneration was so bad with faces. 

He thinks he used to rely on her eyes, but he doesn’t remember what they looked like. Somehow they must have been different, if he relied on them to identify her. 

He feels old, impossibly old, as he sits in down in the console room. He supposes he should - he _did_ spend four billion years being tortured. 

Now that she’s gone anyway, he’s not sure what the point was. Maybe she got away, and it was all for her. In return, all he received was a punishment for his hubris. Breaking all the morals he ever had to save a friend he doesn’t remember. 

For a moment, one glorious moment, he thought the neural block hadn’t worked. That maybe she’d somehow disabled it, playing around with the sonic like she had. And then it felt like his brain was coming apart. 

Hope is a terrible thing when one is on the scaffold. It makes one feel like they can fly. He had hoped, for a terrible, glorious moment, that it wouldn’t work, and then despair as his memories were drawn into the deep reaches of his brain shoved him off the ledge and into the deep pit below. 

He remembers, distantly, asking her to smile. He can’t remember if she did.


End file.
